


so it's summer, so it's suicide

by seraphcelene



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Gansey on Vacation, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, Pre-Canon, The Dream Thieves - Freeform, The Raven Boys - Freeform, Tiny side of oblique Pynch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 15:24:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,534
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15709956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seraphcelene/pseuds/seraphcelene
Summary: "Everyone could see the way his muscles worked, the way we looked like animals, his skin barely keeping him inside." - Richard Siken, Little BeastSo, what had happened was ... Ronan called Kavinsky "K" in that one end scene that one time in Dream Thieves and it was like this personal nickname. Intimate. I wondered about it, and then I made up something. Pre-series Ronan. This is a lot about loneliness. Very first TRC fic, so it's a little rusty and awkward. Unbetad. Not-canon compliant.





	so it's summer, so it's suicide

**Author's Note:**

> The Raven Cycle and all related characters belongs to Maggie Stiefvater. This is for fun and not profit. I'm just taking them our for a little questionable excercise. I'm on tumblr and dreamwidth and livejournal.

i.

Ronan Lynch is a broken thing. A dreamer who dreams in black and blood. Night horrors and his father's brains in the gravel, face caved in and the only reason that Ronan knows its him because of the shape of Niall's unbroken left hand and the one remaining eye floating in its ruined socket. Blue eye – ten billion shades of electric and sky – so very much like his own.

“Jesus God!” Ronan stumbles back, confused, aware of what he is looking at, but unsure of what he is seeing. Niall Lynch laying in a pool of spreading blood and his face is _gone_. Blue eyes and bone and blood and – Ronan looks away from the _mess_ … the _body_ … on the ground and inhales sharply. His chest tightens, resistant to expanding – short exhalations through his nose all that he can manage. It's more panting than breathing, struggling for oxygen until the world swims. When he blinks everything is the color of rain on night-dark glass, a smear of shadow on shadow.

“Kerah!” Orphan Girl, her eyes wide and liquid bright, huddles against Ronan's leg, her arms squeezed tight around his thigh just above the knee. Her voice is high and thin, all sorrow and sharp edges. A metallic echo that shatters Ronan's pressurized grief so that suddenly, with his head tilted back, he can breathe.

He's been here before and it's always the same. This dream is an old memory.

At his feet, Niall whispers, _Ronan_ , as if he means to say _disaster._ Anything else he might have said is lost in the gurgle of blood in his windpipe.

The stars overhead are winking out, dimming as pink and gold begin to rim the mountains in the distance. It's just past breaking dawn, the world covered over in gray and dark. Ronan's feet are bare. And because this is a memory and a dream and a nightmare, true day does not crest. The promise of sun sinks back, pink and gold dawn darken into red then black. The day put out like a candle. The world quiets but for the sudden nail on chalkboard click of true catastrophe looming behind him. Ronan turns away from the stars, from the ruin of his father on the driveway to peer into the maw of the open front door.

 _Ronan_ , his father whispers, but what he really means is _run._

Shadows fill the valley, spilling over the mountains and leaking from the trees. The Barns is a solar system of its own and Ronan can never run fast enough. He stumbles away from the _tck-tck-tck-tck-tck_ echoing from the house. Orphan Girl wails, falling into the dirt, grip shaken loose.

Ronan snatches at her hands, pulls her with him as he runs, even though he knows it won't do any good. Even though he knows that running is the worse possible decision. But his heart is in his throat and his father is dead at his feet.

“Run,” Ronan shouts, heart thudding. There are shadows falling from the trees and he throws up his hands and …

_Ronan._

… wakes with a start. He scrambles up, fists raised. Noah is barely a shadow of a boy in the dark, face unseen, limned by moonlight filtering in through the blinds.

“What the fuck, Noah?” Ronan growls.

“You were dreaming,” Noah says and steps away from the light in the window. Steps back into the shadows near the door.

Ronan scrubs his hands over his face. “I was dreaming about Dad,” he says, voice low and thick. Drawing up his legs, Ronan presses his forehead into his knees and crosses his arms over his head. It's a little like hiding, the loneliest hug in the world. He does not notice when Noah leaves.

 

 

ii.

Three weeks earlier, Ronan had dropped Gansey at the airport. _Stay out of trouble_ , Gansey had said as he stepped out of the BMW. He leaned down to the window, one hand braced against the roof and peered back into the car with his forehead crumpled and worried and something … else … lurking behind the light in his eyes. Something solid and too real to put a name to, as if Gansey could manifest grief and worry as a thing in real life like blood and bone and the ragged reality of torn flesh.

Ronan's mouth had turned up, habitual sneer, his fist thud against the top of the steering wheel and he leaned away from the passenger window, away from Gansey peering down at him. He wasn't going to say it one more fucking time. What he did say had been succinct, immediate, and enunciated very carefully: _Fuck. Off._ Ronan regretted it almost as soon as he said it. But it was too late. There was no way to take it back, no way to unsay it.

Gansey said, _Ronan_ , and Ronan's name was colored in about a million shades of emotion. Gansey's voice sharp and insistent, disappointed and a little hurt despite himself.

Ronan's fists clenched against the steering wheel and he peeled away from the curb with a screech.

 

_*_

 

Henrietta without Gansey is a place of longer days and darker nights. Alternately, Ronan drives aimlessly into the mountained distance or cruises stretches of highway looking for the very trouble that Gansey had warned him away from. Sometimes he even finds it.

Candy-colored cars slung low to the ground. Pocket rockets driven by other bored, aimlessly wandering teenagers. Or, even better, white sunglasses and Kavinsky's leering pout mouthing _Fuck you, Lynch_ , from behind the wheel of the Evo.

Ronan revs the engine then, the BMW growling beneath him. One hand grips the steering wheel, the other adjusts the front of his jeans for the erection pressing against his zipper.

He squints at Kavinsky, heart knocking hard in his chest, his smile a warning and an invitation.

 _Ready ... steady ..._ and then nothing but exhaust like an industrial dream and the stink of burning rubber. When Kavinsky fucks up the shift from third gear to fourth, Ronan thrusts his hand out the window as he sails by, middle finger saluting the sky.

 

* _  
iii._

Ronan doesn't sleep because Gansey isn't home. It's almost a lie, and it's an easy lie because it's almost nearly true. The part that isn't true doesn't require the syllables of his father's name to poison the night air. Doesn't require meaning or explanation.

 

iv.

“It's an utter waste of time. The experiments point to nothing!”

The barely caged frustration in Gansey's voice and the drag of exhaustion riding his bones, makes Ronan want to destroy something, burn the world and fuck the consequences. He rubs his head. His hands desperate to _do_ something. He grinds the heels of his hands into tired, gritty eyes instead. Six hours between Henrietta and whatever back of nowhere mountain he was sitting on in Wales and Gansey calls Ronan because he knows he'll be awake. Ronan suspects that Gansey calls to check that he's still alive. Gansey knows that the quiet, small hours, the still part of the night when the world holds its breath on the way to dawn, is the worse, the most dangerous.

Gansey doesn't ask Ronan how he is. Just starts talking about Wales and Malory and Glendower. As if Ronan picking up the phone is the only answer that he needs. Reassurance found in the muttered _what_ after the shock of Ronan's voice on the phone at all.

“You should get some sleep,” Gansey says finally.

Ronan rolls his eyes and leans his head back against the wall. He doesn't say anything.

“It would be good, I think.”

“No,” Ronan drawls, his voice smoky and low and lazy with how tired he is. Sleeping means dreaming and dreaming right now is not a good idea. “Maybe I'll drive.”

“That way lies trouble, young man,” Gansey says in his crisp Row Team Captain voice. “You should get some sleep.”

“Maybe,” Ronan says, and “when are you coming back?” Even though he had promised himself that he wasn't going to ask. Refuses to admit to being needy and fucking lonely. He almost takes it back. Almost says, _never mind,_ but then he doesn't because he _is_ fucking lonely and he wants to be reminded. Wants to hear Gansey give him an answer to match the date marked off on the calendar over his desk. Something that Ronan can set his watch by. Something to keep him from burning shit down.

Gansey strips the hard edges off his voice, the frustration with Malory and Wales and how much he misses Henrietta. “Two more weeks, I think.”

“Right,” Ronan mutters. “I forgot.” Even though he hasn't; the calendar doesn't let him forget.

“I can come back sooner. If you need me to.” Gansey pauses and Ronan can almost hear the wince through the phone. Team Captain to Boy and Gansey's always a little unsure in the transition. When he says something unguarded. When he knows that he can't take it back

“No,” Ronan drags out the word, still long and low and drowsy. “It's boring as shit around here. Nothing to do. Might as well be there.”

Gansey considers that. “Maybe you should come meet me. Ireland isn't that far. We can visit where your father grew up.”

The idea of it is terrible and beautiful all at once. A place that was his father's but that is not the Barns. A place not menaced with memories, that does not hum with dreaming. Ronan shifts restlessly, massages the back of his neck. He squeezes his hand into a tight fist and presses it against his eye, grinding a knuckle into the socket to just this side of pain. He wants so much to say _yes I will come._ He wants so much to say _what about Parrish._ He wants so much, but Ireland is not Niall Lynch and it isn't the Barns. Wanting and having are not the same things, and hunting for ghosts doesn't change that.

The silence spins out and Gansey sighs softly. He says, “Mom and Dad sailed to Portugal,” as a way to fill the silence and smooth past a suggestion that never should have been made. “So, two weeks, I think.”

“Yeah,” Ronan bites out. “Two weeks.

“Ronan ...” Gansey says.

Ronan hangs up the phone.

 

_v._

For the briefest moment, Ronan thinks about driving to Singer's Falls. He thinks about picking up Adam. Then he looks at the clock and thinks of the greenish-yellow shadow of an old bruise that lingers at the edge of Adam's jaw, and drives in the opposite direction.

Ronan is alone when he parks the BMW on the edge of the abandoned county fairground.

This is how trouble happens and how the night, lit up with dwindling fireworks and the remaining dregs of teenagers too high or too desperate to go home becomes the beginning of something raw and secret and dangerous.

Beyond the piercing glare of headlights on high beam, music, bass low and vibrating, the sultry, humid Henrietta night is hypnotic. More real than the scorched, wasted Henrietta days when exhaustion drags him close to the edge of oblivion, the unrelenting heat and the threat of his dreams the only things that will keep him awake. But like a dream, like a truth too perfect to ever be real, Ronan dozes when Adam is there. When he stumbles into Monmouth and sprawls across Gansey's abandoned bed in boxer shorts and a wife beater, his coveralls draped across a chair to keep the oil off the bed. Adam sleeps bonelessly, desperate to catch up on sleep before his shift at whatever godforsaken shit job he has to go to next. Ronan always stretches out on the bed's opposite corner and the boys trade insults or made-up stories of what Gansey is doing in Europe without them until Adam falls asleep. Ronan stares up at the ceiling, feet flat on the floor, arms crossed over his chest, and lets the afternoon heat slow him down and drag him under. On those days, those desperate, drowsy Adam days, Ronan does not dream.

Those days do not lead to nights like this. Ominous. The air so thick with humidity and potential it's almost unbreathable. Everyone can feel it, the pending panic lacing the air like ozone before a thunderstorm. The eyes beyond the headlights are lit and predatory with anticipation. Starved, expectant, wild.

In the center of the grounds cars careen wildly in the open space, racing, colliding, drifting and spinning out. Ronan roams the hyena packs of the dissolute ringing the outskirts of the grounds trading booze and pills. He tilts his chin up at the people he knows, snagging beers and chasing them with swigs from bottles of whiskey and rum and vodka. He's waiting for the world to tilt, to slide sideways and past the sticky, toffee place where his dreams become elastic. He doesn't want to dream, doesn't want to walk out into wakefulness with some strange and impossible thing clutched between his hands. He doesn't want to dream the Orphan Girl's wanting eyes. He doesn't want to dream of blood. More than anything Ronan longs to suffocate the fire burning him up from the inside, smother it just long enough for him to breathe, to sleep, to maybe see sky. If he keeps drinking he'll just pass out. Come out the other side of sleep with nothing more exciting than a hangover.

In the absence of the Barns, in the absence of home and Gansey and Adam breathing quietly beside him, Ronan is unanchored. Lost to the light. He moves further beyond the cars, drifting deeper into the shadows beyond the headlights, bottle neck hanging casually from his loose grip. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust, it's so much darker beneath the grandstand, but as his eyes slowly adjust, bodies bloom in the darkness hunched and tangled. They lean against cars and hide, tucked into the shadowed lattice of the support beams; it is another country.

“Lynch! What up, man? Can't sleep?” The musty, skunky odor of pot permeates the air. The flare of a cigarette tip lights the near dark. “Three Dicks let you off your leash for the night?”

The laughter that follows is low and mean.

Kavinsky leans against the Mitsu, bony hips exposed by the ride of his wife beater and the dangerously low rise of his jeans. Prokopenko leans into his back, his narrow chin hooked over Kavinksy's shoulder. It's the coil of their bodies that ignites the blaze simmering in Ronan, the careless way that they fit against each other like spoons in a drawer. They are a negative impression of everything that makes up Ronan's stifling Aglionby days. Gansey in his top siders and cargo shorts, Adam hovering in the background.

Ronan snarls, his eyes for Kavinsky only. Hands fist and up before he really even thinks of it, but then there is Prokopenko, his thin, crooked body suddenly standing between him and Kavinksy.

“Hey, man. Chill. We're all friends here. Relax. Have a drink.” Kavinsky waves a hand lazily in the air and takes a drag on the cigarette dangling between two fingers. “Skov,” he says on the exhale. “Get the man a beer. Girlfriend tossed a perfectly good fucking beverage in the dirt.”

Ronan catalogs the bottle on the ground, beer spilling into the dirt, and his empty, fisted hands.

“Waste not. Want not,” Kavinksky drawls as Ronan accepts the bottle from Skov. “We want it all and we want it now. Prokopenko, find Lynch a snack.” His voice goes sharp and predatory on the last syllable. The k hard and intentional.

Prokopenko smiles wickedly, pupils huge in the low light. He holds out his hand, palm flat. A tiny circle of iridescence winks up at Ronan. Ronan imagines Gansey, head up, nose high, kingly. Ronan takes the pill.

 

*

 

Fourth of July and Ronan is pressed against a wall beneath the grandstand. The percussive bass of booming fireworks and EDM keep tempo with his erratic heartbeat

Hips thrust forward, back arched, Ronan grinds his head back against the wall until he aches with it. The pain forces him to come back a little, to draw down away from the creeping shiver in his arms and the building climax bubbling through his blood and lancing straight down to his groin. He keeps his hands behind his back, fingers laced together tightly because those are the rules, no touching. No Touching. Even though all he wants is to press his hands into the back of Kavinksy's head and push him down onto his cock, he does not want to experience the feel of this hair in his palms. There is something too real and too intimate about that. Something about tucking the hair over his ears back that is too much about Kavinksy as person and not dog.

Ronan fucking hates the idea of Kavinksy as anything but a scumbag gangster dog. He also fucking loves it. K kneeling in the dirt, his wide, lush mouth wrapped around Ronan's cock. Looking down, the image of it, the sight, makes Ronan's hips jerk and the pressure at the base of his spine coil tight.

Ronan kicks a bottle away when he comes, the hollow clink against the steel girder almost lost beneath the booming fireworks and the roar in his ears. When he comes, legs shaking, he squeezes his fingers together until they go numb.

Kavinsky spits.

A wad of saliva and semen splat across Ronan's shoes. Ronan growls low in the back of his throat, something to say struggling to find its way to his tongue, but the world is still lit and quivering and he coughs instead.

Kavinsky reaches for the bottle Prokopenko holds out, swishes his mouth with the beer and then spits it out. The next pull on the bottle is a long one and he swallows.

Finally, “Clean yourself up, bitch.”

“Fuck you,” Ronan says, the words bitten out and caught between a growl and a slur of vowels.

“Not if I fuck you first,” Kavinsky says and winks. “I know that was a treat. You were hard as an all-day sucker.” He crowds in close to Ronan, chest to chest, thumb grazing the wet tip of Ronan's softening cock. His mouth grazes the underside of Ronan's jaw, full lips and the gentle scrape of stubble. Then his tongue licking at Ronan's bottom lip, probing the seam of his mouth until he opens. A pill comes with the thick stab of tongue and Ronan, automatically and involuntarily, swallows.

“K ...”

“Shhhh. No names. It's a party, Lynch. Wouldn't want your girlfriend to find out. Secrets in the dark and shit.”

Ronan shivers, his face turning slightly into the bent curve of Kavinsky's throat. Kavinsky presses his fist into Ronan's stomach, presses just hard enough for it to almost hurt, for lust to shoot from his tightening abdomen to his re-awakening cock.

Ronan begins again, starts to say Kavinsky but then it's only “K” at the last minute.

Kavinsky smiles and flattens his hand against Ronan's abdomen. Leans forward, soft mouth scraping against Ronan's cheek and ear. “Lynch,” he whispers, dragging out Ronan's name, sharp and silky like a thing with fur, a thing to pet.

He strokes his way down Ronan's stomach, hand hovering at the top of Ronan's jeans. Ronan swallows and breathes out hard. This feels like everything and it makes his heart stutter, stopping and starting erratically in his chest. He can feel the blood rushing through his veins, the heat in his face and the engorged pain of his cock. Ronan looks up at the sky crowded with stars and it's the view from home on the roof of one of the barns. And that makes his chest tighten, too, because this is so very far away from those days when he would stand on the roof with Declan and watch fireflies hanging in the night air. This is not even Gansey and Adam and the Pig thundering down the open road. This was shadows and secrets. This is not an Aglionby day, but a Henrietta night.

Kavinsky laughs as if he knows what Ronan is thinking.

“Damn!” Ronan flinches, his shoulders squaring up and he pushes away, forcing Kavinsky back one step and then two. His fists are rising, body coiling, and then the pill cuts through him, lighting him up like high beams on a car. Ronan's eyes snap open and the world is a kaleidoscope of color and sound, sliding and melting together. He turns and his gaze collides with Prokopenko's knowing eyes. Prokopenko's sullen mouth tilts up into an equally sullen smile. Ronan closes his eyes. It feels like hours before he opens them again. But they are standing as they were, Kavinsky smirking, hands up, palms out. Prokopenko with his heavy lidded eyes and that smile that says, I know what this is. Been down that rabbit hole, died there.

Everything spins and Ronan lowers his fists, lists to the left, oblivion just beyond the blink of his eyes. This is what he wanted.

“Where you going, sweetheart,” Kavinsky whispers. “Night's still young.”

 

 

 


End file.
